Why Fairness Makes Them Quake Their Boots

Why Fairness Makes Them Quake Their Boots
guest post by Joh Padgett

EYE ON ’08

Disclosure: I am the Communications Director for Indiana 6th Congressional
District Democratic candidate Barry Welsh. Taylor Marsh has been kind enough
to allow me time to introduce her audience to Barry and compare him to the current
Representative, the former radio talk show host Mike Pence. Pence is behind
the recent Media Shield bill and is the leader of the anti-Fairness Doctrine
movement and author of a bill that would prevent future administrations from
bringing back the Fairness Doctrine. He also recently voted to sustain President
Bush’s veto of SCHIP Children’s Health Insurance and is the author of recent
legislation that would gut McCain-Feingold reforms and allow foreign contributors
to pay for issue ads against opponents to their favored candidates.

I first want to thank Taylor for allowing me to introduce her readers to Barry
Welsh, the Blue
America-endorsed Democrat running for Congress in the Indiana Sixth District
covering a long district about the size of New Hampshire that stretches from
the southern suburbs of Ft Wayne, IN in the north to the northwestern suburbs
of Cincinnatti across the Indiana border in the far southeastern corner of Indiana.
Along the Ohio border to the east and as far west as the outer reaches of the
Indianapolis Metropolitan Area. It encompasses a very diverse area of east central
Indiana that includes several urban areas combined with vast swaths of prime
heartland agricultural gold.

Barry is from a working family that includes a proud member of the UAW, a nurse,
a small business owner and his wife Sherri who is an analyst for a major corporation
in the Cincinnatti area. Barry is a Methodist minister who is currently on sabbatical
in order to concentrate on his efforts to unseat Mike
Pence and begin to represent the people of the 6th District in Washington.
For more information please visit his website at http://barrywelsh.org
where you can find out more about his issues and values as well as contribute
to his campaign, volunteer or sign up for his newsletter.

Barry was born in this district, was fully educated in this district and has
worked his entire adult life to improve the lives of his neighbors. He is a
dedicated progressive who believes civil liberties for everybody are true family
values and that freedom is a right that cannot be infringed upon by authoritarians
like Pence. Pence’s steadfast support of the wrong values espoused by President
Bush and his gang of Republicans is not the kind of values voters of the 6th
District expect from their Representative.

I’m not entirely certain where to begin to describe Mike Pence. There are the
usual hyper partisan terms one can grab out of the bag but that is too mundane
to accurately describe him. He is so far removed from exhibiting values that
his constituents can

identify with. The people of the Sixth District are a weathered and tired people
exhausted by the anticipation that help is coming from their “friend in Congress”
as Pence loves to describe himself.

At every opportunity
before him Congressman Pence has managed to put voting along partisan lines
above looking out for the people in his district. When other members of the
Indiana Congressional Delegation manage to find millions of dollars in funding
for projects back home, Pence only brought home $2 million in projects for a
district filled with crumbling infrastructure. When one
of the most poverty stricken cities in the US is the largest city in your
district you can see that extreme conservatism has starved the people of Muncie,
IN.

It is positively heartbreaking to see the closed auto factories in the district,
themselves victims of the policies supported by Club For Growth, Rush Limbaugh
and his fans and other conservative groups, think tanks, organizations and cabals.
To those groups Pence is a hero, to the people of his district he is an uncaring,
uncompromising politician who would rather spend time fighting fairness at every
turn.

Whether its fighting the Fairness Doctrine in radio, or fighting the so called
527 organizations that advocate for specific issues like MoveOn.org and other
groups that sprang up after McCain-Feingold was enacted. Even taking on Hollywood
in an attempt to extend regulations governing adult film actors to producers
of R rated films, Mike Pence will default to the most extreme right wing talking
points issued by the White House to their corps of lackeys and lapdogs with
him acting as one of their alpha male chieftains.

You have to look at the bigger picture with Pence. He is just like every other
extreme conservative in that he has a few hot button issues that drives the
bulk of his fundraising efforts, and having been a conservative talk show host
in Indianapolis he has a lot of friends in the big media business. The bigger
picture for Pence is anything that benefits the giant media corporations is
good for his career and so he does their bidding in Congress.

After Judy Miller did time and the owners of the NY Times dodged a bullet (thus
far) from the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson it was decided a Federal Media
Shield Law was needed and so their friend Mike Pence, one of their own really,
comes to the rescue with a bill that even includes protection for bloggers (if
you actually derive substantial financial gain from your activity as a journalist,
meaning most of the blogosphere both left and right would not be shielded from
subpoenas like every other kind of journalist).

So what do the Fairness Doctrine, Media Shield and McCain-Feingold have in
common that would convince Pence to expend so much political capital the year
before an election? All 3 of these issues in one way or another deal with leveling
the playing field in Republicans’ favor by ensuring conservative talk radio
shows dominate the radio airwaves, conservative pundits dominate the op ed pages
and opening up the playing field on our TV sets by allowing anonymous issue
advocacy groups to buy airtime before elections to advocate for specific issues
friendly to conservatives. He even wants foreign companies to be allowed to
pay for issue ads. Now we know why Halliburton moved their HQ to Dubai, its
business as usual even though they are a foreign corporation now.

So when you see what he is up to it becomes clear that all of this political
capital he is spending must point to some pretty big ambitions for the 4th term
Congressman from Columbus, IN. We’ll examine the ambitions of Mike Pence next
week in greater detail and discuss his recent past, his current ambitions and
the various rumors swirling around him regarding future plans.